I would like some success examples to pesuade my boss transfer from win7 to centos gnome desktop.
my boss said no because win has group policy to manager the endpoint pc but centos has no such function.
which big company use centos destop in daily work?

it was the best thing ever, except for when I had to install it, make Nvidia work with it, update it or change any settings... but other than that it was amazing!

I don't think it's worth it to use CentOS as "Desktop"... unless you mean "client platform where you just have the tools that other servers have for compatibility purposes and you just ssh on the machine and work with it"...

then in that case I guess pretty much anyone that works with centos as server

I strongly disagree. One get a rock stable, well tested, and problem-free desktop platform with many many years of bug and security fixes. I use it (and maintain it) on many workstations. (CentOS 6 and CentOS 7) IMHO CentOS is the most underrated Desktop OS.

because in a business environment it really makes no sense to spend 3 days configuring your desktop

3 work days makes around 24 hours. What the heck are you configuring all these 24 hours? And I don't see at all what must be configured exclusively in CentOS, except the addition of the epel repository which is a no-brainer.

... that's really the only situation where "time IS money"

Which is IMHO a strong point pro (and not contra) CentOS. Just take a look at the lifespan of CentOS compared to Fedora or Mint, this means less times upgrading to a new release. It's rock stable and well tested, this means less struggling with bugs and new problems introduced by updates. I also maintain workstations running Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, and in the long run CentOS really needs the littlest amount of time.

I use C7 on my main workstation at work that is integrated with an off-net C5/C6 cluster. This internet-facing workstation runs C6 with Fedora & C7 VMs available. At home my main workstation is C7 which acts as a server to my wife's C6 machine. The biggest problem I find is certain companies (including recently Cannon, Garmin & UKTV) will regard you as a "non-person" and either offer no support or else actively block Linux. I'm not into gaming or "bleeding edge" applications, so stability is of more importance that having the latest gizmo.

I have been using as a professional engineer Centos 7 on my dual Xeon workstation desktop and as a server since first release of C7. Am conservative and need stability. It's been the best decision ever since leaving windows. Don't miss it a bit though corporates have a blinkered attitude to:
1/ Linux re desktop apps,
2/ Centos is only for servers (rubbish!)
3/ as mentioned active discrimination (for business reasons?) against linux
4/ ooh its open source can't be any good then.
and as a result no one wants to write commercial apps equivalent to Win10 apps and support can be poor from 3rd parties. It's a chicken and egg situation. No one wants to invest in commercial desktop apps for linux due to perceived lack of demand. But demand is poor because there's few apps. But it is changing - slowly, once cost and usage advantages become apparent.

Centos Workstation has been rock stable for me. However in the first year of Centos 7 there weren't many non-server apps in the repos. That has now changed. However it's also not that difficult to create you own yum repository packages as long as your disciplined. Just grap those from Fedora 22-24 repos, adjust specs and compile and place into you own yum repo. Bingo it works provided the dependency version of Centos match or you have to go down the dependency domino tree which then does get painful but doable.

I have to admit I hate Gnome. Use KDE and it's been great. Only one hick up - when some moron modified gtk3+ without coordinating with KDE package requirements resulting in some issues last year. But latest repo releases have fixed that.

My only current issue is interacting in dual boot with windows 10 where I'd like access to the Windows 10 managed raid 0 partition on my son's digital content creation workstation used for cinemagraphic work. Unfortunately no professional editors exist for Linux, that's why dual boot for Win10 apps. Although there is a tool to help, libldm (ldmtool), unfortunately the centos kernel does not enable CONFIG_LDM_PARTITION option. That's surprising for a "server" OS in today's multi-OS environments but also representative of conservative RHEL/Centos for stability which i would have thought any boss would appreciate.

Eventually we will move to virtualised Win10 (for editors) once kernel incorporates mdv for mediated PCIe pass-through for graphics cards to enable OpenGL and CUDA support using Nvidia drivers. Current version of ovirt has this and I will investigate and trial this soon.

Note also in the movie industry where supercomputing style performance is paramount to render visual effects, cad-animation etc much of the industry is moving to linux. An example, final digital masters (DCM) for distribution have been standardised by their standards body to ext4 formats -see DCM (Digital Content Master?)

Those contemplating Centos-7 for Workstation particularly for Digitial Content Creation where I am helping my son a film maker, Centos renders Visual Effects, ray-trace or other rendering 30% faster then for the same software package in Windows (eg Blender / Nuke and other professional enterprise package in the movie industry). So check out the big corporates of the movie industry. There's action there.

Also CERN using ScientificLinux a derivative of Centos uses it in their workplace. Governments around the world have also been looking at linux for the workplace.

For high performance computing workstation workloads Win 10 can't touch a Centos workstation in terms of speed and performance, stability or security. SELinux in my view is a big selling point.

So for standard enterprise desktop, Centos 7 is easy and no brainer. Give it a try. In many ways equivalent to expensive Macbooks but you have a stable OS for 10 years. Calculate the cost savings. They can be substantial provided you have linux apps as suitable equivalents for the enterprise workflow. If not, then you're stuck with Win 7/8/10.

In our case Win10 and Centos are still cost effective because of the 30% performance advantage of Linux when rendering when compared to Win10 for same commercial package - see Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, Blender (being adopted by professionals now), Nuke and many others. In our case a 1.5 hour animated movie on a dual Xeon E5-2687W takes 67,500 hours to render under Linux. Under Windows it would take another 20250 hours to render. Now you wouldn't do this if you work out number of days for a single workstation. You'd use data-centre or Amazon EC2 to reduce this but it shows the performance difference for HPC workloads that a Centos workstation provides versus the same hardware under Windows.

I have used openSuse and Fedora. The issues there is the bleeding edge issue (a la bugs / instability etc) and constant software updates that can be hard to keep up with particularly when things break. That's why I do not recommend these for desktop in the enterprise. I do not know about Ubuntu or Linux Mint but I imagine its the same issue their if their using the latest apps and kernel.

Now Macs are better for the enterprise due to Apple support and apps but you pay for it and then there is no cost advantage in switching over from Windows. In fact it probably would cost to switch.

If you want to convince the boss do the numbers. Money talks. Check all the apps needed in the enterprise. Are there equivalents in repos? Calculate license fee saving per seat but add training cost for Centos and different apps. If its cost effective, give the numbers to the boss - then talk turkey! Until then your wasting time. posting.php?mode=edit&f=11&p=266357#

I strongly disagree. One get a rock stable, well tested, and problem-free desktop platform with many many years of bug and security fixes. I use it (and maintain it) on many workstations. (CentOS 6 and CentOS 7) IMHO CentOS is the most underrated Desktop OS.

because in a business environment it really makes no sense to spend 3 days configuring your desktop

3 work days makes around 24 hours. What the heck are you configuring all these 24 hours? And I don't see at all what must be configured exclusively in CentOS, except the addition of the epel repository which is a no-brainer.

... that's really the only situation where "time IS money"

Which is IMHO a strong point pro (and not contra) CentOS. Just take a look at the lifespan of CentOS compared to Fedora or Mint, this means less times upgrading to a new release. It's rock stable and well tested, this means less struggling with bugs and new problems introduced by updates. I also maintain workstations running Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora, and in the long run CentOS really needs the littlest amount of time.

Meh I only disagree because by desktop I (anyone has different needs) mean "cutting edge" software, like for example an advanced kernel to test stuff on or for example the latest version of ffmpeg.

yes you can compile whatever you want and you can adapt whatever you want... but after the first adaptation you enter the realm of maintenance.

but who am I to judge, about a decade ago I decided with all myself to put together a FreeBSD desktop and I did, definitely not my easiest desktop... so I guess CentOS 7 would be ok as a developer's desktop for as long as nothing "too new" is required.